There is 1 item tagged:food safety

China’s growing appetite for meat and dairy is driving big changes in everything from farming to food safety. For the country’s increasingly wary consumers, those changes can’t happen quickly enough.

Over the past three decades in China, meat consumption per capita has quadrupled. This rapid change in diets has paralleled the massive migration from the countryside to the cities. City dwellers eat twice as much meat on average as those back in the villages.

This has put a strain on the country’s land and water resources. Agricultural runoff, mostly manure from large-scale farms, is causing water pollution within the country. Because of water shortages, China imports 70 percent of its soybeans and increasing amounts of its corn from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina to feed its cows and pigs.